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Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

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Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can rest assured a company firing you for what they saw while surveilling your work computer will not be so stupid as to reveil this fact. That would indeed be a liability for them. They will simply invent a different reason for firing. Because they know it's not allowed (or at least frowned upon), but they decided to do it anyways, the company surveillance is kept secret and downplayed and plausibly denied as mu…

Well, usually they would never tell the person the real reason for the firing or layoff anyways. there's no benefit for them to tell you, it just increases liability.

Telling people the reason is also likely to provoke an argument, which is often heated, and may become violent.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#582
The tracking is horrible. I often leave my computer for up to 30 minutes to brainstorm or think about a difficult problem. I do this even more now with AI than I did before because the nature of my work has changed and requires more foresight. So the idea that my mouse movements are tracked would force me into counter-productive patterns and narrow-minded thinking by staying at the computer.

The best ideas I've had came to me overnight or over the weekend while my mind was at rest. Those ideas are those that keep paying dividends.

But I also need frequent breaks day-to-day, especially if using an LLM to code; I need to step back and refine my approach. I don't want to let the LLM seamlessly vibe-code me into a bad decision.

I've never met anybody who could come up with good ideas in a rapid-fire way. The stress associated with the need to churn out a steady stream of work makes you fall prey to sunk cost fallacy because you don't pause to reflect on anything you do and it gets worse over time. You end up creating unnecessary problems without even realising it because your mind is subconsciously trying to fill the time with work. The goal takes a backseat.

The taboo is awful because I see the effect in my junior colleagues sometimes, leading to over-engineering and I just want to tell them to take more frequent breaks to let the idea rest but it feels like something I'm not supposed to say.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying the people who have been working for Meta had no other options? That would be a ridiculous claim. The point is that there have been many, many options and yet they chose to interview for Meta and take the offer. Bold assumption.

You can't tell me that someone took an offer from Meta because it was their only option. This is just absurd.

I guess it would depend on the role.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#585
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make a profit? I looked into it but the startup and running costs means I would have to sell more than 100 pretty expensive coffees per day just to break even.

Yes. Margins are high in coffee. We serve a high quality product that customers feel is priced in the value range and we are at like 70-80% blended gross margin. There are plenty of busy shops at >80%. It takes time to ramp up, but 100 orders a day is nothing. We do more than that in an inexpensive suburban strip mall. You can easily get into the hundreds in a high traffic location. The key is to develop a base of re…

I have so many questions. What was your initial startup investment? How did you pick the location to set this up in? What did your business plan look like? How many employees did you start with? How long did it take you to make a profit? Were you a coffee connoisseur before you got into the business? How do you select your beans? How did you do your marketing? I would love if you would answer these questions.

Alternatively, how did you figure all of this out when you first started out? Who did you go to so I can find a local analog here.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#586
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they do not bring work laptop. A separation is a separation.

Travel doesn’t always mean vacation, or work. For me, it’s rarely only one.

Well I guess we all live very different lives :)

I only bother with one phone plus an emergency backup because the only work things on my phone are a chat app and some authenticator codes.

For laptops, I wouldn't take any on vacation because I'm not working. I'd take the work one for work trips.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from housing the costs aren’t that much more. You pay the same to travel. You pay the same to buy stuff online. Food is maybe slightly more but it’s not that significant. Once you get past being able to afford housing it’s insanely lucrative. It’s harder for entry level people of course.

I have had that discussion multiple times with people. They all seem to think you absolutely need to live in a 5 bedroom 5m$ house in Palo Alto (because how else are you going to live?). But if you rent a normal 2BR for 4000$ in the Bay area, and could potentially rent the same for 1500$ in a LCOL, that is a minimal saving compared to your income. Everything else stays mostly the same. An on top of that most companie…

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

$1600 will get you a respectable 2-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood in Chicago, which most certainly isn't LCOL. If you want your 5-bedroom mcmansion in Northbrook or your artsy flat in Wicker Park, then yeah that'll cost more - see your point about houses in Palo Alto.

A downright nice 2-bedroom apartment in the heart of Rochester MN will run you $1300/mo tops, and $1000/mo is well within reason.

I had to do this math fairly recently. For me, moving from a relatively pricey part of the midwest, the number was 2.2x my income for SV to be viable. Now that I live here, I find that I actually undershot a little, and it's more like 2.4x to break even. I thought groceries and restaurants and such would be roughly the same. They aren't.

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#589

Reminds me of one of the more brilliant passages in Snow Crash , describing work in "Fed Land"... ''' Y.T's mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this m…

Always thought it was weird for the omniscient narrator to refer to her as “YT’s mom”

I found Snowcrash to be surprisingly poorly written. Especially given that I had read Cryptonomicon and Diamond Age before it. The quality of writing is so different. I thought perhaps Snowcrash was his first novel, but it wasn't!

Re: Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's another example of how the intentions of the good can be easily lead astray by the corruption power brings. Using it as the name of a military contractor misses the point so hard I almost expect it to be intentional, but I suspect it's just teenage-boy level foolishness.

It's not just "just" when people as mature as teenagers are running politics and business.

sadly it's always been this way
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